Stack Overflow – Developer Survey Results 2017

Each year since 2011, Stack Overflow has asked developers about their favorite technologies, coding habits, and work preferences, as well as how they learn, share, and level up. This year represents the largest group of respondents in our history: 64,000 developers took our annual survey in January.

As the world’s largest and most trusted community of software developers, we run this survey and share these results to improve developers’ lives: We want to empower developers by providing them with rich information about themselves, their industry, and their peers. And we want to use this information to educate employers about who developers are and what they need.

We learn something new every time we run our survey. This year is no exception:

A common misconception about developers is that they’ve all been programming since childhood. In fact, we see a wide range of experience levels. Among professional developers, 11.3% got their first coding jobs within a year of first learning how to program. A further 36.9% learned to program between one and four years before beginning their careers as developers.

Only 13.1% of developers are actively looking for a job. But 75.2% of developers are interested in hearing about new job opportunities.

When we asked respondents what they valued most when considering a new job, 53.3% said remote options were a top priority. A majority of developers, 63.9%, reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say they’re full-time remote or almost all the time.

A majority of developers said they were underpaid. Developers who work in government and non-profits feel the most underpaid, while those who work in finance feel the most overpaid.

Want to dive into the results yourself? In a few weeks, we’ll make the anonymised results of the survey available for download under the Open Database License (ODbL). We look forward to seeing what you find!